If you mean http://learn.elgg.org/en/stable/guides/river.html that is up-to-date for Elgg 5.0

This is what I was looking at;
http://learn.elgg.org/en/stable/guides/river.html

However, I see this;
"As of Elgg 3.0 the view parameter is no longer required. A fallback logic has been created to check a series of views for you:"

Maybe that's what made me wonder if this was only for an older version. If I have the right url to add river, does anyone know of a video or article showing us non developers how to add this to our site? I'd love to have a 'feed' like look.

BTW, thank you for your reply. I'll take a closer look at that now.

I'm a little nervous about using plugins yet.

I believe you're still in the testing stage, not production. So you can always disable plugins

I'm only using core plugins so far.

Also it's possible to define a set of default widgets which will be added to a new users profile once they register.

Check out the admin section Configure -> Utilities -> Default widgets.

Please note this will only work for new users, existing users will not have their profile widgets changed.

Here is the screen I get each time I confirm as a new user.   The upper right box is all we need. 

The center block with "bad request" and "error" are bad bad bad :-)    Thanks again.   

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_VJYuTaBrwvaGyXKav_b8IYWHPbrw2ea/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_VJYuTaBrwvaGyXKav_b8IYWHPbrw2ea/view?usp=sharing

This is not a bug, but a feature :).

You have activated 'User email validation' plugin and enabled 'New users require manual validation by an administrator' option at the same time.

I think you should choose one of these.

Leave the plugin enabled and disable the mentioned option.

After these changes, you'll not see this warning.

Thank you so much. I'll play with it an report back.   

I can't try it out myself anymore, so I can only guess what might be the reason.

Do non-admin group members see the group description (as opposed to non-group members who are not admins)?

Do you use any 3rd party plugins that might add additional functionality to groups or might alter the Elgg core access level handling?

If you can see the description as admin it means that any access restrictions are simply overriden by the admin privileges. Now you need to find out what exactly restricts the access/visibility for non-admins. The could be due to some settings of Elgg for the corresponding groups and/or by some options added by some additional plugins. I can only suggest to think a bit about what plugins are possible candidates for altering the visibility and look through all relevant site / plugin / group settings. Maybe you come accross this one option that causes the issue.